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Post by nightreader on Oct 26, 2007 17:20:40 GMT
i115.photobucket.com/albums/n299/andynmagic/Clawsreduced.jpgClaws Of The Night - Vern Hansen (1963 Digit Books) The story opens with Ray Lemmings, a young research metallurgist at a giant steelworks, going home after a long day at work. The Canaver Steelworks state of the art laboratory is close to a breakthrough in its creation of a new metal, one which has qualities of a living organism. Ray decides to take a short cut back to his lodgings, where he is staying with his girlfriend Pamela and her mother Agnes. The short cut goes across the waste ground to the rear of the steelworks. He passes the old incinerator which has been extracting waste from the works and dumping the residue on to the waste ground. He notices something faintly glowing in the darkness and the thickening fog... Ray is attacked by some thing which claws at his leg and shreds his raincoat. When he gets home he is delirious, put to bed and a doctor called. On his torn raincoat there is a foul smelling pale yellow slime... Ray is the first to fall victim of the unknown thing on the waste ground. A young girl is killed and found with a hole in her stomach, covered in the horribly smelling yellow slime which is faintly glowing. In the hospital mortuary Old Sims, the creepy and possibly pervy porter, loves his job and can't wait to look at the new dead girl that has just been brought in. As he approaches he sees the body has swollen massively and there is a sickening stench in the air which sends him fleeing for help - and only just in time as the girls body explodes and the mortuary goes up in flames... Superintendant Ronan and Inspector Cooley (granite faced, implacable but imaginative) are called in and it's not long before they realise the site of the old incinerator is the focal point of a spate of unexplained deaths. They also start to understand the killer may not be human. They find claw marks in the earth and a trail of stinking yellow slime, where once there had been a slag heap. The slag heap has gone... Then it all kicks off, the Army are called in bearing machine guns and flame throwers. Their prey, the thing, has become known as the slag... "There was no more fog yet but the night was dark. And this was the night that to the journalists first of all, and to the police, and then to the general public became known as the Night of the Slag..."
 This has got a kind of 'Quatermass' and 'The Blob' feel about it, with a great cast of 60's characters - like Elizabeth Guttering "a thirty five year old alcoholic tart" now known locally as 'Old Betty', who nearly comes a cropper on the waste ground while entertaining Bert the farmhand. As with many of these creature features the means of finishing off the beast is quite ludicrous, but taken in the spirit of the novel it's totally appropriate. This aint art but it is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. It's got it all - a mysterious and deadly creature stalking the unwary in foggy darkness, leaving only a stinking yellow trail of slime in it's wake. A cast of enjoyable and engaging characters. Masses of unintentional humour... Brilliant. 
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Post by dem bones on May 6, 2019 14:16:20 GMT
"The Night of the Slag." Can only second Nightreader's appraisal (above). Boring horror at it's most exciting. It had been a normal day for Ray Lemmings, laboratory assistant at the giant town steelworks — normal, that is, until he decided to make his way home through the waste ground behind the works.
Suddenly, in one of the numerous slag heaps that littered the area, HE SAW SOMETHING MOVE.
As he went over to look closer, the ‘thing’ catapulted itself at his throat and be felt huge claws tearing at him — fastening themselves in his palpitating flesh . . .
LEMMINGS WAS THE STRANGE MONSTERS FIRST VICTIM, BUT HE WAS NOT TO BE THE LAST. FOR IN
TWO DAYS A WHOLE TOWN FOUND ITSELF AT THE MERCY OF THE NAMELESS TERROR IN ITS MIDST. |
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Post by helrunar on May 6, 2019 20:29:00 GMT
"Night of the Slag," the exciting sequel to that chart-topping page-turner, "Dawn of the Slapper."
And believe me, some of the slags in my town sport shiny scarlet claws that truly look ready to "Eat it alive" as Mrs Pierce Nase so memorably phrased it.
cheers, H.
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Post by dem bones on Jul 27, 2019 17:32:26 GMT
Vern Hansen - The Grip of Fear (Digit, 1964)  Sam Peffer
All Hands at the Ploy
Rendezvous
My Name is Woman
The Woman Upstairs
The Toper
The Arm of the LawBlurb: Here are more stories by the author of that best selling collection, THE TWISTERS; and each one of these, too, has the sting in the tail which is the hallmark of the ‘Hansen’ story.
Here again are stories for each and every taste, no matter how weird or out-of-this-world . . . .
Out-of-this-world as were the protagonists In THE BOY ON THE SECOND FLOOR; weird as the voice of THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS . . . .
Or maybe the gentle reader will fancy more those 'loveable' subjects in ALL HANDS AT THE PLOY. Or the woman whose name was . . . . well, there are so many women, so many names, and here was a man who desired all the lovely creatures.
Maybe the iron-stomached ones among you might fancy to shake the hand of 'the mummified arm' ...
But do not shake the mixture; imbibe it in small doses, savour the delicacy of the flavours and the textures. Most important of ail: DO NOT IMBIBE ALONE OR LATE AT NIGHT. Remember what happened to littIe Jimmy Pill in the story called THE TOPER. And be warned . . . . Hadji doesn't get around enough. While nobody could accuse Vern's second collection of being any good, it certainly shares that same something had readers of Claws of the Night yawning for mercy. The Boy on the Second Floor: Art school student Jo Chandler, nineteen, dreams of leaving behind her square parents, quitting the North for Chelsea and living a proper Bohemian lifestyle. Jo makes do with hanging out at the local coffee bar, The Hairless Faun, where she meets Doodles, a half caste jazz trumpeter. When Doodles' band are booked to play London, Jo, who thinks she may be pregnant by him, takes her opportunity. The easy-going musician rents them a squalid attic bedsit in King's Road. No sooner has Doodles packed his bags for a U.S. tour than the boy on the second floor makes his move. Ken Enders, so pale and cadaverous as to resemble a sick cat, is a writer. Aware of Jo's vocation, he insists on showing her a stack of paintings left behind by a girl who stopped at his flat a while. The largest canvas is remarkable; a five-dimensional sci-fi landscape splattered with red which, on closer inspection, resemble monstrous animals and even the occasional human. The effect is quite obscene. Ken challenges her to identify Lena in the painting. As she scans the unnerving canvas, he creeps up behind her, and .... All Hands at the Ploy: When man all but wipes out his species in an atomic war, the Ploys - technologically advanced, peaceable robots - and their earlier, inferior prototypes, the Spives, seize control. The new regime prosper until Rex Forty-Three, a mysterious new super-Ploy, turns renegade and sabotages construction of a skyscraper-high calculator known as "The Loon." The ensuing confusion sees humankind topple the Ploys, regain the upper hand so they can ruin everything all over again. Sci-fi shocker. It could happen. Rendezvous: They've been exchanging love letters for six years, now Marion is finally set to meet ex-pat Jack Benson, 24, who is returning to England having spent the last six years in Canada working on Uncle's ranch. Jack suggests they rendezvous at "the little tobacconist on the corner" he fondly recalls from childhood. Unfortunately, Jack is no longer used to big city traffic .... Admittedly, All Hands at the Ploy and Rendezvous are not all that, but this next is up there with the very best 'Hansen' moments. The Woman Upstairs: Old William Proudies cares for his bedridden wife, Rachel, has done for as long as anyone can remember. Rachel was "a flighty bit" in her day, but polio has reduced her to a poor, twisted thing. William runs a grocer's store whose customers are used to hearing Rachel banging on the floor with a stick and demanding her husband fetch her this or that. Poor sod, it's no life for anyone, though you'll not hear William complain. Young Tom Lane, travelling salesman, visits the shop once a week to keep an eye on the kindly old man. Rachel has been quieter of recent weeks, and William's mood perked up accordingly. So why does the familiar summons from above set him racing from the shop and into the path of an oncoming car? As Mr. Proudies is loaded aboard the ambulance, Tom heads upstairs to break the tragic news to his wife ...
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Post by dem bones on Aug 11, 2019 11:53:32 GMT
My Name Is Woman: "Nobody went near the summer house now, for the ground around it was very marshy. A year or so ago a sort of putrescence had begun to ooze from the earth around there. The negro servants, particularly the gardeners, who were an unintelligent superstitious breed, gave the place a wide berth."
Pel Sooney, the most powerful man in Loomis County, is also the most despised on account of he pretty much owns the place and can't keep his dick in his trousers. Sooney's excessive bed-hopping has achieved Casanova proportions since wife Kate oh-so-mysteriously "moved back East" with none having witnessed her departure. Our lubricious State-governor-in-waiting comes a cropper when mysterious trespasser Grace Fontayne, quite the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, lures him across the stinking mud to the deathtrap that is the summer house .....
Beatnik vampires, skellington brides, sexual predators, lonely hearts, renegade robots, disembodied arms (we'll get to that one). Honest, I've no idea what Mr. Hadji is moaning about.
The Toper: .... OK, so maybe he has a point with this parable on the evil of drink. John Crone, timid 24 year-old warehouse clerk, ill-advisedly becomes the unlikely drinking buddy of old Jimmy Pill, an alcoholic fellow border at Mrs. Murgatroyd's boarding house. Since losing his job, Jimmy has been persecuted by pink elephants, meaning he frequently wakes screaming, which does nothing to improve relations with a landlady to whom he owes plenty rent. Mr Crone rarely gets drunk, but Jimmy's condition proves contagious with fatal results. Unintentionally or otherwise, the pay off is hilarious.
The Arm of the Law: West Roan Hamlet, New England. When Jack Jimmason, the last of a feared line of law officers, is murdered during a bank raid, his severed flame-grilled arm hunts down and throttles the culprits until only Packy Kolowski remains. The gang leader steals a car, makes a break for it across the Mexican border, but the rotting limb is unrelenting. Far the longest story (60 pages), definitely one of the more effective.
Vern Hansen. They sure don't make "masters of the uncanny" like they used to.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 17, 2023 8:40:26 GMT
Vern Hansen - The Twisters (Digit, 1963) Little Joe
Come Hither, My Love
The Rat-Catcher
Cloud
Blood of My Blood
The Effigy
Beetles on the Bed
Finger-Tapping
His Long, Lovely Week-end Blurb: Here are stories for the connoisseur of the strange, the horrible, the macabre, the fantastic; stories for each and every taste.
Your flesh will crawl as you read of the horrible fate that ultimately came to Little Joe. You will warm to the romance in His Long, Lovely Week-end... until you reach the shuddering climax. You will feel cold fingers caress your spine when you read Finger-Tapping...
Perhaps you will prefer the strange sadness of Beetles on the Bed or the fey humour of Cloud; the ghoulish laughter of The Effigy; or the horrible unworldliness of Blood of My Blood and the jazz-men who blew a different tune...
You may remember best 'the one about the rats', or the one about the strange lovers that eternity could not part. In any case, we can safely predict that every one of these stories will leave a lingering something behind in your mind. For each one has a twist in its belly, a sting in its tail...Little Joe: Suffolk countryside to begin with, various unnamed locations thereafter. Born to Mrs. Tappman while she is mourning her husband, baby Joe has the most prominent Adam's apple the doctor has ever seen. It's almost as if there's an extra limb growing out of his throat. Mum buys her son a silk scarf to wear at all times, so other kids won't make nasty remarks about his creepy neck. It doesn't always work. Joe likes school, but his mother only has to read about a child-strangler loose in the vicinity, and she moves them to another city. It is almost as though murderers and 'sex perverts' follow them up and down the country! Unlike most boys his age, Joe is comfortable around girls. Now aged eleven, he falls for a girl three years older than himself. Mrs. Tappman is thrilled. Joe and Eileen are inseparable as the scarf around his neck, until ... Come Hither, My Love: New York. Jerry, a reformed safe cracker and thief, is making a go of it with an old flame, Sandra Judson, when he's persuaded to pull one last job. Tragically, he and his craven accomplice are disturbed at work by someone who ought not be there. It is her life or his. He's arrested leaving the building. On being told he has throttled his girlfriend, a secret call girl, the distraught young villain attempts suicide in the cells by smashing his head on the wall. The following morning his corpse, naked but for a certain flimsy item of clothing, is recovered from a field. How on earth can it possibly have got there? From the look on his face, Jerry died blissfully happy. The Rat-Catcher: Pillydonnuck. Five years after winning a fortune on the sweepstake, Coney returns home from America to resume his duties as the village rat-catcher. Great is his joy to find the calvert still rodent-infested as ever! Never mind that he's older, slower and fatter from all that good living , nor that he had his faithful doggie put down — let battle recommence! Cloud: Picnicking in the garden of his grand Sussex home, Mr. Frederick Manning-Clitheroe dreams of freedom from his domineering horsey faced wife, Muriel and her equally dreadful Cairn terrier, Boobles. The sky takes pity on him. Little Joe definitely one of Vern's more accomplished works, and The Rat-Catcher might have scraped into a late 'sixties Pan Horror. Come Hither, My Love is another for Fashion Victims.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 19, 2023 11:23:36 GMT
Blood of My Blood: Rafe Maxton, thrice divorced Hollywood screen idol, falls for a New Orleans chanteuse, Miss Emma Lane, playing the Moondripper club with Bill Witt's jazz band, great musicians all, though Rafe wonders how come these "coloureds" look so blank-eyed and bloodless. Not that he believes in 'zombies,' 'voodoo' and what have you - that stuff's for zanies. Rafe and Emma wed in secret. She insists they spend a weekend at her secluded Southern mansion to ... celebrate.
The Effigy: Sergeant Jack Pillings dresses a booby-trapped, life-size dummy in a dead man's uniform and has the ladys position it into no mans land. A German bullet to the effigy's face triggers several land-mines along the trench, killing himself and multiple colleagues. After the massacre, the effigy vanishes. Soon word reaches the men that a maniac is at large strangling enemy troops.
At close of the war, the sergeant returns home to Liverpool with a mysterious "brother" whose face is so hideously ruined he keeps it permanently bandaged. Their arrival coincides with the first of several ripper murders ....
Beetles on the Bed: African mission school setting. The ghost of a consumptive violin virtuoso serenades his beloved English teacher, 'Aunt Polly,' one last time. She joins him in sweet death. Can't say I thought much of this one.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 6, 2023 8:10:24 GMT
Finger-Tapping: "Even if the gal is a Cater an' as common as cow-dung she certainly don't look it. If there's a prettier an' better-designed filly in this whole goddamned state I'd certainly like to meet her."
Cannon Branch, a small Deep South community. Sam Ossenfer returns home unexpectedly to find his hussy tramp wife, Lucy Ann, pleasuring his brother, Lafe. It's not like they ain't shared one another's gals before, but, damn it, marriage is SACRED. Sam chops down Lucy Ann and runs Lafe clean through with a sabre, and drives their corpses to the swamp. Seeing it was Lafe's fingers caused all the trouble — Lucy Ann just couldn't resist a jig when that boy performed on his squeeze box — he severs and binds 'em in a rag.
His Long, Lovely Week-end: A 45-page supernatural horror to finish on, and one of Hansen's finest. Peter, a timid London clerk, can't believe his luck when Carlotta, the hot new girl at the agency, not only agrees to a date, but suggests he accompany her back home to Wales for a two-day break. 'Home' is The Turret, a remote and gloomy mountain pub with no customers. Carlotta books them in as 'Mr and Mrs Proudie,' which Evans, the ancient landlord, evidently finds grimly amusing. But for Evans and his vicious black cat, Satan, the dirty weekenders have the place to themselves. Locals avoid it as it has a bad name on account of a tragedy. Seems early in the century the proprietor fell for a girl way too young for him who taunted him with a string of lovers, until eventually he went at her with a knife ...
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